The 3 most popular articles I ever wrote

I’ve been writing for a long time, and on business specific topics for at least the past ten years. For a variety of reasons, I’ve only recently built this central repository – but that doesn’t mean my history is completely hidden on the web.

Indeed, there are 3 articles of mine that have been read, shared, and re-read over the years they have been live. Since they continue to live on their original sites, please allow me to share them with you.

In 2012/13, my good friend Kerno and I had a crack at an email startup called EveryDayDream Holiday. We wanted to be transparent around the whole process, so at the end of our first month I wrote this breakdown (in 2 parts) of our success…or effective lack thereof.

It ended up on the front page of Hacker News, was covered in the Wall Street Journal, and was loved and trashed across the Twittersphere. Traffic for this article dwarfed all of the traffic for the actual travel entertainment, which is both nice and not.

Paul Graham (pg) is a well known hacker, less well known painter, and the primary face of Y Combinator and Hacker News. I delivered a presentation at a Hacker News – inspired Meetup in London, combining some of pg’s writing (his so called ‘Startup Curve’) with Shirlaws’ Stages Framework.

Both the article and the associated video of the presentation received a traffic bump several months later, with Fred Wilson (aka A VC) linked to it while writing on the subject himself.

I think my fascination with London’s ‘Monopoly Pub Crawl’ (where you visit every named square on the Monopoly Board, in order) started with Red Dwarf. I later researched it at length when writing a radio play called Doctor Who and the Monopoly Pub Crawl of Doom, or ‘Pardon Me, have you seen my Tardis’ – figuring that knowing the Pub Crawl would make up for not knowing anything about Doctor Who.

Naturally, when I lived in London, completing the Pub Crawl for myself was a top priority. Thanks to the support of my beautiful wife [Spoiler Alert!] I managed to complete it…just!

And then two years later I got to relive the experience via EveryDayDream Holiday – and to my delight, it’s been really well-received, shared, and somebody even added it to the Wikipedia page on Pub Crawls!